Thirteen Hours on a Pole In January 1924, a former sailor, boxer, and stuntman named Alvin “Shipwreck” Kelly climbed to the top of a flagpole in Hollywood, California, and sat there for 13 hours and 13 minutes. No broadcast carried it to a waiting audience. By the time he climbed down, a crowd had assembled … Read more
A T-Shirt That Shouldn’t Work Picture a shirt: a hulking figure in an old diving suit, one arm ending in a spinning drill, standing where a soft round forest spirit should be. Next to him is a small girl in a yellow dress, watching him the way you’d watch a bus arrive. That’s “My Rapture … Read more
The Flag on the Tailgate Anyone who has hauled plywood home from the lumberyard knows the ritual. A standard sheet of plywood runs 8 feet long, and on plenty of pickups that’s enough to leave it sticking out past the tailgate. Someone zip-ties a red flag to the corner, and the drive home happens at … Read more
One Kilogram That Never Moves Take 100 kilograms of potatoes at 99% water: 99 kg of water, 1 kg of dry matter, starches, fiber, minerals. Let a little moisture escape, just enough to nudge the water content from 99% down to 98%. A single percentage point. The potatoes now weigh 50 kilograms. Half the original … Read more
A Gap Nobody Noticed The human nose has attracted considerable scholarly attention, from the outside, at least. Sander Gilman, a cultural and literary historian, spent his 1999 book Making the Body Beautiful: A Cultural History of Aesthetic Surgery tracing how doctors and patients have reshaped the nose’s exterior across centuries, from syphilis-era reconstruction to modern … Read more
A Kid, a Sign, and a Sacramento Street Corner Picture the intersection of Truxel Road and West El Camino Avenue in the Natomas neighborhood of Sacramento. Strip malls, traffic lights, cars rolling through on an ordinary morning. Nothing about the corner suggests anything unusual is happening. Then you notice the kid. A fifth grader, standing … Read more
The Window You Couldn’t Walk Past On July 2, 2009, shoppers moved past a Lush Cosmetics store in southern Paris the way they always do, nobody glancing twice at the display glass. Then the window stopped being ordinary. A woman hung inside it, painted silver from head to toe, arms slack, head tipped back. Oversized … Read more
The Key You’ve Pressed a Thousand Times Has a Name Almost Nobody Knows Pick up a telephone or glance at almost any social media post: the # symbol is everywhere. Most people call it “pound,” “hash,” or “number sign.” But Bell Labs engineers, in the era when touch-tone dialing was being invented, gave it a … Read more
A Radio Antenna You Can Turn Off With a Faucet At SPAWAR Systems Center Pacific, a US Navy research lab in San Diego, California, engineers pointed a nozzle at the sky and fired a plain jet of seawater into the air, then used that jet to send and receive radio signals. No metal rod, no … Read more
A Giant’s Face, Everywhere You Look There’s a good chance you’ve walked past this image without knowing what it is: a giant, scowling face in flat black and white, with one word, OBEY, stamped underneath. It shows up on stickers stuck to street signs, stenciled onto brick walls, printed on T-shirts, and slapped across skateboard … Read more